Of all the arenas gone from New York, there are two that a sports-obsessed New Yorker may regret most never having seen. One is the old Madison Square Garden, with its Saint-Gaudens statue of Diana dancing on the skyline, and its memorable murder, when, in 1906, Evelyn Nesbit’s deranged husband shot and killed the architect Stanford White. The other is the Polo Grounds on 155th Street and Eighth Avenue, with its one-of-a-kind horseshoe shape, its oddly rural placement within Coogan’s Bluff, and a dramatic death of its own, when, fourteen years after the White murder, Carl Mays struck and killed Ray Chapman with an inside pitch, still the only on-field death of a player in the history of major-league baseball. There are other places it would have been nice to see: notably, Ebbets Field, in Brooklyn, the home of the Dodgers until they were snatched by Los Angeles. But Ebbets at least has had its façade and some of its dimensions replicated in today’s CitiField, which Fred Wilpon built, the way moguls can, as a monument to his Brooklyn-baseball boyhood.
But the Polo Grounds uptown still touches hearts while having truly disappeared. Jimmy Breslin, in a fine new collection just published by Library of America, conjures the childhood memory of seeing the green park in the gray city: “I start squeezing and pushing through these men because the moment I get near the top of the subway stairs I can look around and see the ballpark, the Polo Grounds . . . and for me that was the best part of the whole day at a baseball game, coming up the subway stairs and seeing the park for the first time.” The Polo Grounds holds our hearts in part because in photographs it still looks so weird. Staring at an antique panoramic picture of the great pitcher Christy Mathewson on the mound in 1913, one can hardly believe how bathtub-shaped the stadium is, how close the right-field bleachers, how wildly distant deep center, how high the overhanging porch. Damon Runyon, writing in 1911, exclaimed, “The Polo Grounds! It means the Big Town; it means the Big City Club; it is all the lights of Broadway and the lure of Gotham summed up in two words. . . . It is a place of surpassing magnificence, sparkling beneath the silver sun like a great green jewel, and best of all, it is the abiding place of the Giants!” One notices that Runyon seems indifferent to how bizarre an anachronism the name was for a baseball stadium—it’s a holdover from an earlier, failed life with the horsey set—and also that newspaper copy editors were much kinder to the beautiful semicolon than they are today. When Yankee Stadium opened, a few years later, Runyon treated it more cynically, as an outsized commercial venture that might or might not work.
Glory! Romance! We can’t help elevating our experience of games into the epic realm. The cartoonist Randall Munroe, the creator of the comic “xkcd,” once had his stick figures decide that they would use the output of a weighted random-number generator to build narratives; “All Sports Commentary” was the caption. True enough. Kevin Baker, in “The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City” (Knopf), tells stories about the development of baseball, many of them involving the Polo Grounds, and, as with earlier baseball bards, the narratives come complete with morals. But his have a harder, more disabused edge than the familiar sporting sort. The gentle haze that lay over the legendary history book “The Glory of Their Times” (1966), which was edited by Lawrence Ritter and which covered much of the same territory, here evaporates under the brighter sun of candor and confession. We get sharper engravings of brutal exploitation and raw appetite, with the team owners mostly favoring the first and the players mostly favoring the second.
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Baker’s point, doubtless annoying to fans elsewhere, is that the rise of baseball as we know it was centered in Gotham, the one place where the necessary density of big money, large stadiums, daily tabloids, and assorted crooks could remake the game from “base ball,” the nineteenth-century country (and soldier-camp) sport it had been, to “baseball,” the big business it became. Baker therefore takes on the familiar role of the hardboiled Gotham reporter, maintaining a knowing “Let me dry you out behind the ears, kid” tone throughout. And so the tale of how the Giants established themselves at the Polo Grounds is told, accurately enough, as a piece of complicated capitalist skulduggery in which the team’s desperate owner bought a controlling interest in the Baltimore Orioles and then dragged its stars north. (It is useful to be reminded, for those fans still mourning the loss of the Dodgers to L.A., that New York baseball, too, was made by greedy wanderers coming to a growing town.) Baker also details how Hilltop Park, the first home of the Highlanders—an American League team that, in the nineteen-tens, would become the Yankees—was developed and leased by a rogues’ gallery of Tammany politicians and cops, hidden, in the classic Mob move, behind a figurehead owner.
Yet Baker, an iconoclast by temperament, is a mythologist by vocation. Someone writing about sports has to have a taste for myth, or else it all dissolves into numbers. So Babe Ruth gets the same Rabelaisian introduction that he has received since the nineteen-twenties, except that the stories are franker and the words ruder: “The Babe liked to eat and drink and fuck, too, even if he wasn’t big on reading. . . . The Babe was said to have rented out entire whorehouses on the road for a night; the ladies revived him for another round by pouring champagne over his head.”
Baker’s account of Christy Mathewson, who, starting in 1900, pitched seventeen seasons for the Giants, is more worshipful—all the revisionists in the world can’t shake the legend of Mathewson as a captain of men and a gentleman of integrity. (Umpires were said to consult Matty on close calls, trusting that his honest eye would be keener than his club loyalty.) But Baker grasps that Mathewson’s was a deliberately willed and crafted persona, one that enabled him “to be a magnet to the fans . . . without provoking the jealousy and suspicion of teammates.” And he shrewdly points out that, though Joe DiMaggio and Derek Jeter both learned to adopt this mask with minimal slippage, Reggie Jackson and Alex Rodriguez, equally big stars, were unable to do so, to their detriment. In Runyon’s Big Town, you have to be a fine gentleman and a regular guy. Baker finds a wonderful quote in which Matty discusses the importance of having what he called “an alibi”: “You must have an alibi to show why you lost. If you haven’t one, you must fake one. Your self-confidence must be maintained.” Baker rightly connects this remark to Ring Lardner’s great comic story “Alibi Ike,” certainly the single funniest baseball story ever written, which we can now see provides a mock-heroic version of something actually heroic: a great baseball player’s imperturbable façade.
Mathewson’s opposite number, Hal Chase—a brilliant first baseman and a compulsive gambler, who did more than anyone to bring the corruption of betting to the game—is just as vivid and demonic here as he has been in earlier tellings. Chase and Matty ended up playing together on the 1916 Cincinnati Reds, in a collision that has the inevitability of tragedy and that would have made a fine film for, say, Tom Hanks as Matty and Tommy Lee Jones as Chase. Before long, Mathewson discovered his new teammate’s predilections, and had him suspended. When Mathewson was in retirement and ailing (he’d been accidentally gassed during military training exercises in 1918 and subsequently contracted tuberculosis), he was practically the only member of the baseball establishment to catch the scent of what the sports gamblers were up to.
Though the teams involved in the great World Series fix of 1919 were from Chicago and Cincinnati, the scheme was, in essence, a local game, too, rooted in New York gangsterism—in particular, in Arnold Rothstein’s gambling empire. Baker notes that the Chicago White Sox players put out the word that they were “for sale” only after years of mistreatment by Charlie Comiskey, the team’s owner. Soon they were inundated with offers. Then Rothstein, after first apparently making an ostentatious public show of denouncing all such cheating, decided to finance the fix. (He used his public rejection of the scheme as another kind of “alibi.”) Watching the series, Mathewson circled the suspicious plays in red on his scorecard. No one wanted to believe it, not even Mathewson. Only when the scandal blew up the following year was it clear that his unease had been well founded.
Chase, to be sure, ended up forlorn and alone. “I’m the loser,” he said on his deathbed. Mathewson had died two decades earlier, saying to his wife, in one of the most touching of American farewells, “It’s nearly over. I know it, and we must face it. Go out and have a good cry. Don’t make it a long one.” From Homer’s Hector on out, heroes take a familiar shape.
Baker is both up to date and persuasive in his treatment of nonwhite players and teams in the city. Curiously, Native Americans were accepted as ballplayers and athletes from early on; Charles Bender and John Meyers, of Ojibwa and Cahuilla ancestry, respectively, and both called “Chief,” were major stars in the early nineteen-hundreds. But, for Black players, the “color line,” despite some brief stabs at breaking it, was absolute, and the myths on which generations were raised were bereft of essential truth. The tale of how Jackie Robinson, with the backing of the Dodgers’ general manager Branch Rickey, integrated major-league baseball was inspiring gospel for generations of American liberals. In “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Philip Roth’s narrator explains that his father was kept well below the executive level of the New Jersey insurance firm he worked for not simply because he was Jewish but also because, with his eighth-grade education, he “wasn’t exactly suited to be the Jackie Robinson of the insurance business”—and Roth could be sure that everyone would get the admiring joke.
Yet, well before Robinson’s arrival, the Negro Leagues were already major league, in the simple sense that, had there been a World Series between a team from the Negro Leagues and one from the white leagues, either could have won. The story of how Robinson braved bigotry to break the color line is heroic, but it shouldn’t distract from the cruel absurdity of there having been a color line to be broken. Baker makes the reasonable case that the Negro League’s Lincoln Giants, with its short-lived offshoot, the Lincoln Stars, was “one of the greatest New York teams ever assembled, in any sport.” Among its players was Oscar Charleston, who, by increasing consensus, is considered one of the four or five finest center fielders ever to play the game. But the Lincolns played at Olympic Field, which Baker describes as “a small crude long forgotten park” in northern Manhattan, and later at the Catholic Protectory Oval, a still more obscure park, built for an orphanage in the Bronx.
Baker is also very good on the extraordinary story of the entrepreneur Alex Pompez and his New York Cubans. Pompez, who represented himself as a cigar tycoon, in fact made his fortune in the numbers racket. He assembled the first great team of Latino players but initially imposed an ethnic barrier of his own, excluding Black American players and arousing protests from the Eastern Colored League. The petty cruelties of American racism are a permanently depressing subject.
Baseball in New York was also a well-written sport. Though Baker pays attention to the role of the New York newspapers in creating a city of baseball, and he quotes from Runyon, he rather condescends to the sports pages of the early era, as amounting to so much “ballyhoo.” (“In other words, hoopla, hype, publicity, press. New York was the world capital of it.”) In his account, the papers and the writers are something of a Greek chorus, helping narrate the action but not sharply personified as individual voices.
Yet a reasonable case can be made that two essential manners in American prose—the laconic, tight-lipped style (Hemingway began as a newspaperman and sportswriter, too) and the loquacious high irony that A. J. Liebling passed on to Tom Wolfe—began in the baseball stories of the New York papers. The sportswriters were there to write, in ways that the other people on the paper weren’t. Here’s Runyon on a single play in a single game:
Old Casey Stengel is a hero, even if the author is aware that this is just a contest being played for money by men of dubious honor and tawdry appetites. Runyon knew that these two things were true: the contests were epic in the enjoyment they provided, and they were miniature in their importance. This practice, of remaining close to the field but also distanced from it, evolved into the smooth, smilingly detached narratives of such writers as Red Smith and Liebling. This magazine’s own Roger Angell shifted that mode into unapologetic fandom, in which the point was not to be an insider at all but to watch from a perspective as bemused and engaged as that of Henry James watching Daisy Miller—empathy without undue explication. Philip Roth used to say that listening to Dodgers games as a boy, with the eloquent Southerner Red Barber narrating the adventures of the Brooklyn Bums, taught him more about the power of point of view than any English class did. You could write that way about other things than baseball, but baseball was a good thing to write that way about.
Is the romance of baseball in New York coming to an end? The anchoring of sports in community seems further and further away, and the modern American curse of a capitalism that makes people feel miserable without visibly immiserating them affects sports just as it does everything else. One turns back to the real question: Why do we care? Why can the narration of these long-lost and in themselves insignificant contests still enliven our imaginations? Confucius says—an old-fashioned locution, perhaps, but appropriate here—never to take interest in feats of strength. And, in the main, we don’t. Sports are an artificial, deliberately narrowed activity that we create, in order to have moralizing stories to tell. If we didn’t have the legend of Christy Mathewson or Willie Mays, if we ascribed to such men merely feats of strength and speed rather than ebulliences of character, we would be bored.
There are passions that have to be private to be felt, and others that have to be communal to be real. Making up morality tales about small differences in physical performances is as necessary a human occupation as offering wildly differing rewards on the basis of equally minute differences in physical appearance: he’s a god, she’s an angel, he’s a star. We live within our bodies and honor them by admiring ones nimbler than our own. There seems no way out or up from this preoccupation. It gets its grace by becoming common.
The strength of our moralizing instinct is shown in the vindictive nature of our assessments of right and wrong in sports. We’ve kept Shoeless Joe out of the Hall of Fame, for the same reason that we’ve kept out Pete Rose and Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, even as we recognize inconsistencies in these judgments. Pete Rose’s sin—betting on baseball—is scarcely a sin at all for those outside the game, but it is rightly a capital offense for those within it. We accept the inequity of banning Shoeless Joe for having helped throw the 1919 World Series while enshrining the White Sox owner Charlie Comiskey, even though it was Comiskey’s greed and stinginess that pushed Shoeless Joe to take the gamblers’ money. We may recognize that the ban on performance-enhancing substances is hypocritical—pretty much everything that an athlete takes is in some way “performance enhancing.” Yet it is the cost of the activity to the nonparticipants that makes us rebel. The cost of corruption is the cost it imposes on those who would rather not partake in it.
We want clean games because games are so valuable to our self-making. The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, in his fascinating book “Games: Agency as Art” (2020), argues that we have tended to overrate or sentimentalize “pure play” as an ideal while condescending to organized and commodified games as secondary or corrupted forms. He insists that, instead, all games are structured forms of play that teach us, through abstract, stylized example, the ins and outs of agency. In most of life, he points out, we pursue disorderly means toward reasonable goals: we want to get into the right college, or find a perfect life partner, or raise our children well, and we make foolish mistakes before we do. Only in games do we pursue orderly means toward ridiculous goals: touching home plate with your toe is by itself a meaningless purpose, but we learn to do it in ways that are beautifully shaped and orderly and teachable. Watching baseball, we learn cause and effect, strategy and tactics, the uses of delayed gratification, how potent the anticipation of other minds can be. We obsess about games, because they instruct us on how to accomplish things, and on the varieties and strategies of achievement. Certainly, generations of American teen-agers, in their torrid fumblings, took to heart the “model of agency” supplied by baseball. James Thurber made a cartoon of this: “And this is Tom Weatherby, an old beau of your mother’s. He never got to first base.” The segmentation of the game suggested the sequences of seduction.
The constant transmutation of play into games and games back into play is at the heart of our fandom; something that, for the athletes, is done for money—often in pain or without much pleasure—becomes, for the fans, an unstructured escape from responsibility, the thrill that Breslin felt on running away to the stadium. But what is a serious game for the fans—their own fandom—becomes play for the athletes, who, knowing how similar they are to the ones in the other uniform, cannot take most results too solemnly. The fans regard the game as joyfully ridiculous and the players regard the fans as deeply ridiculous, and there’s a fluid interchange between the game we see and the play we share.
That’s why diehard fans, on the whole, take losing harder than the players do. Pro athletes can often say, “They just played better than we did,” or, alternatively, “That’s just the way it broke,” more serenely than the fans can. When we watch the players congratulate one another after the game and exchange warm words, the social ritual they’re enacting is a way of turning a game back into some decent form of play: Hey, we competed, we all did well, see you next year. For that matter, it’s when we hear of the players admitting helplessness that we recognize their humanity. The legendary remark of the Yankees’ great Mickey Mantle on being once again struck out by the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax—he shrugged and said to the catcher, “How the fuck is anybody supposed to hit that shit?”—suggests just the state of fatalistic acceptance that professors used to admire in Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. Stoicism suits center fielders, and princes. People contrast “passive” spectatorship with active play, but there is nothing passive about fandom. The player may be passive in a Zen sense, cultivating a zone of quiet concentration; the fans, on the other hand, have a critical, leaping voice running in their head.
It seems unlikely that any sport will now bind a city together as baseball once did New York. But, then, another version of this bonding is already under way, around the multiplayer video games that form communities—stretching improbably and beautifully across age cohorts—and they do teach agency of a kind. (Those games, indeed, are what Nguyen primarily has in mind.) A century from now, someone will write a book like Baker’s about how the cultural broadband of the country, and then the planet, got wound around Assassin’s Creed and Halo, whose now stunning graphics will look, in an approaching age of 3-D illusion and tactile immersion, as charmingly period as those photographs of the Polo Grounds seem to us. Play into game and game into play: it’s a permanent story. All we can do is tell it again. That eulogy from Runyon about the glory of the Polo Grounds was written right after it was razed by a fire, in 1911, only to be rebuilt and back in business the same year. In the Big Town, as Runyon knew, you can always burn it down, and start over. ♦
